The Two Garfields: The racial achievement gap at a premier school

Garfield High School, Seattle: Tuesday morning, fourth period. In Room 321, teacher Alan Carpenter writes a problem on the board for his remedial math class:

A driver in a car with a full tank of gas sets out for Spokane ...

More in this special report:
- How other high schools compare
- Photo Gallery: Life at Garfield
Distance, miles per gallon, elapsed time -- it's a question of rate and proportion, Carpenter tells the 22 freshmen and sophomores. Some students pull out pocket calculators and punch in numbers. Others struggle to focus, their concentration wandering, distractions coming more easily than answers.

Next door in Room 320, teacher Seth Bundy reviews a test for his honors-level pre-calculus class. In soft, soothing tones that carry easily in the quiet room, he speaks of asymptotes and irreducible polynomials. The 26 students listen attentively, occasionally jotting notes.

Achievement level and content define much of the difference between the two math classes, but there's another contrast, too: In the remedial class, all but one of the students are black; in the honors class, white students fill the seats, along with a handful of Asian students.

The "two Garfields": It's a term recognized widely, if reluctantly, by teachers, administrators, students and parents throughout Seattle Public Schools -- and a longstanding reality that disturbs and even angers those on either side of the Garfield divide.

As another tumultuous year comes to a close, and another Garfield principal calls it quits, district officials once again are grappling with the future of a school with a split personality.

One Garfield shines as the academic flagship of the public system, a magnet high school with an accelerated program that attracts many of the city's best students to the Central District -- most of whom are white. They win national scholarships and use Garfield as a springboard to the Ivy League.

The other Garfield functions as the neighborhood high school in the heart of Seattle's historically black community, drawing mainly students of color to a standard lineup of courses. For many of those students on the lower end of the scale, Harvard seems an impossible dream, and getting a high school diploma can be a challenge.

"They're failing those kids miserably," says Schelia Ward, a black woman with two children among the 1,650 students at the school.

The phenomenon of success and failure splitting along racial lines is hardly unique to Garfield among schools in Seattle, in Washington state or in the nation. It's the "achievement gap," the stubborn racial disparity in student performance that haunts American education and that stands as the prime target of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

"I've been known to say that we have two school districts here," says Seattle School Board member Darlene Flynn, who is black. "Garfield is just a very graphic building, where we have the two ends of our school district side by side."

But the emergence of Garfield as the poster child of the achievement gap is not just the unavoidable result of demographics and history: Educational engineering has also played a role.

Garfield has been selected as the home of the most extensive lineup of Advanced Placement courses in the Seattle district. AP classes prepare students for rigorous national exams and burnish transcripts for college admissions.

At Garfield, enrollment in AP and other honors courses is significantly whiter than in the school as a whole. The school's administrators and counselors maintain that all students are encouraged to take the most challenging classes they can handle -- but Ward and other critics say counselors sometimes use skin color to judge suitability for accelerated classes.

Black students and parents aren't told about all that Garfield has to offer, the critics say.

"The information is kept from us," Ward says. "I think it's done on purpose."

Ward says she's had to be persistent to learn about Garfield's academic system. Her daughter, a junior, has stuck to the regular curriculum. Her son has, too, as a freshman this year: Ward says she wants him to master the basics of high school before stretching for honors classes in the grades ahead.

"We're not saying we don't want an AP program at Garfield," Ward says. "That's a wonderful opportunity; it's good for the college-bound kid. But don't block my kids if they can do it.

"Don't block them. At least give them a chance."

Meryl Schenker / P-I
At Garfield High School, the social separation typical of many schools reflects a deeper racial division in the classroom, where the collision of demographics and enrollment schemes creates an extra-large achievement gap. Administrators are struggling to find a leader who can unite the school.
District officials and Garfield administrators insist there's no racial bias at work. They urge critics to be patient and allow initiatives aimed at narrowing the black-white gap to bear fruit.

Susan Ders?knows all about the two Garfields. When she became principal three years ago, district administrators asked her to bring together the sides of a school that had long been apart.

Ders? who is white, is giving up the effort, taking over West Seattle High in the fall. She's circumspect about why she wanted the transfer -- and insists the decision was hers alone -- but the internal conflicts at Garfield clearly sapped her resolve.

"There are feelings and concerns over the progress of African American students in this building, and very strong advocacies. ... It taps into a lot of emotions," she says. "It's a difficult school to lead.

"There's a portion of our school that does exceedingly well -- and another that does exceedingly poorly."

Now, for the sixth time in 10 years, Garfield is searching for a new principal.

"It's a doable job," Ders?says, "if the school community can look at itself and say we are going to suspend distrust and support this new person, and give the person time to show what can be done -- because the factionalism can so easily arise."

'Bottom line is access'

On a Wednesday night in January, a dozen black men and women gather around a long table in the downstairs parlor of Mount Zion Baptist Church.

Ward is there. So is Shellise Montgomery, a Garfield alumna. With the others -- parents, alumni and parents and grandparents of alumni -- they make up the Garfield Community Coalition, a group worried about the obstacles they say black students face at Garfield.

The discussion is passionate, sometimes tearful. The group directs much of its anger at Ders? The principal, Ward says, "carries the water for the AP students' parents."

The advanced programs are a sore spot.

"The bottom line is access," Montgomery says. "Our students are not getting these classes. They're getting commercial foods, they're getting gym, they're getting beginning math. Never before has Garfield discouraged so many black kids as they're doing now."

Montgomery is the mother of two sons -- one in elementary school, the other in middle school.

"I come from generations of people going to Garfield," she said a few days before the meeting. "My kids will be going to Garfield. My issue with the school is, in 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education was enforced because blacks were not receiving a quality education -- and now in 2004, they're still not receiving a quality education.

"You have a school for white kids, and you have a school for black kids."

Last summer, coalition members presented a list of recommendations to the district. They wanted Garfield to hire more black teachers, end racial inequities in discipline and recruit black students for AP classes. And they wanted the school to effectively dismantle AP "until there is equal access to all programs for all students."

Ders?insists that Garfield seeks out black teachers and staff members and has cut down on suspensions and expulsions of black students. The school also has adopted special strategies for boosting black AP enrollment, she said.

The coalition claims black students can't find the classes to fill their schedules. While they roam the halls, coalition leader Elma Horton says, AP students get their pick of uncrowded classes in "the little white college on the third floor."

Meryl Schenker / P-I
The Seattle Smooth Sigma Beta Club practices a dance routine at lunchtime. Affiliated with a national black college fraternity, the club aims to push all its members to continue their education after high school. John Lyons, left, Jason Wilson, center, and club President Clayton Kadushin, second from right, work with other members.
Ders?says that when she arrived at Garfield, two-thirds of the classes with fewer than 30 students were AP or honors courses. Now the ratio is closer to 50:50 -- a step toward equity, although the advanced courses account for only about a fifth of all offerings.

An October records check showed just four students with holes in their schedules, she says. The rest carry a full load of six classes a day, except for seniors who have met graduation requirements.

Ders?denies that black students are shunted to less-demanding classes. She says she's worked to reduce the number of students wandering the halls during class time. She has also moved to break up the clustering of AP classes on the third floor, assigning some to portable classrooms.

Producing academic stars

For Robert Vaughan, the greatness of Garfield is cause for celebration.

"Garfield is absolutely a tremendous, standout magnet academic program," he says. Vaughan, who is white, worked as a psychologist at Garfield 20 years ago. His daughter attends the school now, and his son is a graduate. Vaughan serves as associate director of the Academy for Young Scholars at the University of Washington, but from 1991 to 2001, he coordinated programs for gifted K-8 students in the Seattle schools.

Roughly a third of the white freshmen at Garfield each year are graduates of the Accelerated Progress Program, which Vaughan oversaw at the school district. APP caters to the most academically talented elementary and middle-school students, who typically must score in the top 2 percent on a standardized test to participate.

APP students learn at a stepped-up pace in classes reserved for them at Lowell Elementary and Washington Middle schools. Many move on to Garfield, their designated high school, where they are guaranteed admission. They enter ninth grade as an elite cadre, and they loom large in the culture and mythology of the school.

Meryl Schenker / P-I
During lunch break, Pam Burovac, 17, helps Anders Marshall, 18, left, with a role in the school musical "Anything Goes." The seniors say they like Garfield for its real-world atmosphere. "They don't try to shelter you," said Burovac. In the background are, from left, Devin Engledew, Amiee Kehrer and Val Seriuner.
Of the 87 APP kids in Garfield's current freshman class, two are Native American, three are Latino, four are black, 21 are Asian and 57 are white. The APP alumni are joined at Garfield by many students from the slightly less-selective -- and predominantly white -- Spectrum program.

In high schools throughout Seattle, black students lag behind white students by a wide margin, as measured by the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, the benchmark standardized test in math, reading and writing administered in the spring of the sophomore year.

At Garfield, the gulf in performance between white and black students yawns especially wide.

"It is the academic disproportionality problem at its zenith," says Vaughan. "You've got 35 to 40 percent of the students that are probably the highest-achieving students in the state of Washington -- along with students who are from the neighborhood, who are not achieving dramatically differently than if they were anywhere else in the city's schools."

That mix means that differences in ability among students are inevitably sharpened, says Gary Thomas, the black chairman of the Garfield business and technology-education department.

"This situation was set up," he says. "It was set up without a lot of forethought, without a lot of follow-through. This a grand experiment -- and it needs more attention from the district."

What worries Thomas is that for black students, "smartness starts to develop a face and a color. ... We had 25 valedictorians (at Garfield) last year, and none of them were black. That's a problem."

In the late '90s, some black Garfield parents organized as Parents for African American Student Excellence. Mary Wideman-Williams, whose daughter graduated last spring and whose son is a freshman, is one of its leaders.

"A lot of times, black kids in that school look at white kids in that school -- and we're not talking average white kids -- and they see the gap between how brilliant some of those kids are, and what the opportunities for them have been," she says.

"And they kind of give up."

Black students 'intimidated'

The path from the Garfield campus to Princeton, Harvard or Stanford is clearly spelled out in the school's course guide, which lays out a sample curriculum for students seeking admission to highly selective colleges.

A second suggested route leads to the UW or other public four-year schools. A third culminates simply with a diploma.

Meryl Schenker / P-I
With other selected freshmen, Kaneshia Brooks participates in the Achievement Via Individual Determination program. It's one of two ninth-grade initiatives designed to boost minority participation in the school's overwhelmingly white honors courses.
The fastest track is peppered with honors classes and the AP courses they feed into. AP European history comes in sophomore year, followed by two more years of AP history and government, along with two years of AP English and a year of AP calculus. Some students go beyond that regimen, packing in a second year of AP calculus, or AP Latin or chemistry.

White students outnumber black students nearly 8 to 1 among the 630 Garfield students enrolled in at least one AP course this semester, records show. Black students make up 30 percent of the school's total enrollment, but fill 8.5 percent of the AP slots.

Despite that, more black students -- 52 -- are enrolled in AP courses at Garfield than at any other public high school in Seattle. But false impressions keep that number lower than it might be, teachers and students say.

"It's that myth of who can take it and who can't," says Laura Strentz, a white English teacher who in 2002 started the African American Scholars program to boost students into AP courses. "It's that myth of culture: 'Oh, we can't take that class.'

"The African American student is maybe not as aware of how the system works. It's maybe a lack of confidence -- and not just confidence, but ownership. The APP students feel entitled to be here."

Enrollment in an AP math and science course calls for a faculty recommendation. AP history requires an A or B grade in a lower-level honors course, while the English department lists no prerequisites at all.

But some say that many students at Garfield still believe, erroneously, that they must take a test to enroll in an advanced class.

"The counselors don't let us know, and I don't think the school does a good job of letting us know," says Corey Overall, a senior who was one of two black students in his ninth-grade honors history class.

Nikita Love, a black sophomore who was an African American Scholar as a ninth-grader, agrees.

"Some of the counselors kind of sell you short. They're more biased toward the white," she says. "When you tell them, 'I want to go to Harvard,' they'll say, 'Well, maybe you don't want to go to Harvard -- maybe a historically black college.' "

Black students say there are other, unwritten barriers to access -- psychological ones and cultural ones.

"It's an uncomfortable feeling to be surrounded by a lot of people that don't identify with your race," says senior Abel Kifle, who was one of three black students in his 11th-grade AP English class.

Says Love: "I know when African Americans see 'honors' or 'AP' on the paper, they get scared. They don't go for that. They settle for less."

The African American Scholars program is one of two recent initiatives designed to spur freshmen from under-represented groups to aim for AP courses. It's early yet to assess the results, though teachers and administrators report some incremental gains. Ders?thinks the impact will show when program graduates reach 11th and 12th grades, when most AP classes are offered.

Garfield's rich legacy

Opened in 1923 in a red-brick and white-stone building at the corner of Jefferson Street and 23rd Avenue, James A. Garfield High is a school rich in history.

A second-floor hallway is lined with portraits of distinguished alumni from the '20s, '30s and '40s in academia, law, medicine, engineering and the military. The auditorium is named for Quincy Jones, the celebrated musician, composer and producer -- and member of Garfield's Class of 1950.

Garfield routinely leads all public schools in the state in turning out National Merit Scholars. The school's sports tradition is illustrious, its jazz program nationally recognized, including last month's triumph at the Essentially Ellington competition in New York.

The school makes a particularly strong claim to the affections of many black Seattleites.

"Garfield is an icon in the Central Area, in the African American community," says Wideman-Williams, the parent leader. "There's just something special about Garfield."

For many years after it opened, Garfield -- a neighborhood school enrolling students from Capitol Hill, the Central District and other areas south of the ship canal -- stood out in the lily-white Pacific Northwest for the racial diversity of its student body.

But as migration to the suburbs altered the city's demographics, Garfield's enrollment changed, until by the early '60s black students made up a majority.

By 1973, Garfield was 81 percent black. Its overall enrollment was plunging and so was its reputation, tarnished by news accounts of racial tension, hallway fights and holdups in the restrooms. There was talk of closing the school.

As early as 1968, the district established a special program at Garfield to attract white students from across the city. In the '70s, Garfield emerged as the home of the magnet high-school science program. Busing, first voluntary and then mandatory, was adopted to foster integration.

Over the years, more high-powered courses were added across the Garfield curriculum. Today, Garfield's AP enrollment is easily the largest among the city's 10 comprehensive high schools.

Garfield continues to draw many students from the city's whiter neighborhoods under the district's school-choice system, and seats in the freshman class are much in demand. The wait list to get into ninth grade this fall numbers more than 200.

Dealing with perceptions

For all the divisions at Garfield, it's not as if the school is staked out by rival gangs fiercely guarding their turf. Kids mingle easily in the maze of corridors, and no place seems off limits. Many classes are mixed racially.

Senior Dusty Klass, college-bound and with plenty of honors and AP classes on her transcript, picked Garfield as her high school because of its diversity.

"I went to elementary school in South Seattle, at Thurgood Marshall, and there I was one of five white kids in my class," she says. "And then I went to Eckstein (Middle School) and there were like three black kids in the whole school.

"High school is supposed to teach you about life. Most high schools don't do that, and Garfield is one of those that does -- both the bad and the good, completely."

Corey Overall, too, plans to continue his education after high school.

"My experience at Garfield has helped me a lot," he says. "It's been a real good experience, just being around different races, being exposed to different lifestyles, different personalities.

From 1977 to 1988, and again from 1994 to 1996, Ammon McWashington ran Garfield as its principal. Now he's the district's administrative director for high schools, and he'll play a significant role in picking Ders?s successor, after listening to an advisory search committee that includes representatives of several Garfield constituencies.

"The thing about Garfield you have to deal with are perceptions," says McWashington, who is black.

The way to change some of those perceptions -- like the view that nearly all black students are flunking, or that the curriculum is tailored for white students -- is for the principal to make clear that the school is for everyone, and to push for every program to reflect the student body as a whole, he says.

Despite the continuing controversy, McWashington says there are no plans for a radical overhaul of the school -- no intention to dismantle the honors program or eliminate preferential admissions for APP students.

McWashington says he would like to open all advanced classes to whoever wants to take them. And Garfield administrators and counselors should make it clear to students what their choices are during freshman orientation.

"I don't think there's anything broken" at Garfield, McWashington says. "I just think they need a leader there who can get them through the time that they are in and pick up where Susan left off."

The bigger and more fundamental challenge is bridging the racial chasm in academic performance, a task the Seattle schools have declared is Job One.

"It is a long-standing problem to which no other school district has found answers," the district's Web site says.

McWashington speaks hopefully of the effort under way to develop a five-year plan for the district, with closing the gap at its core.

The district hosted a community forum on the plan in April and intends to complete the strategic blueprint this fall.

District officials are also pushing the most ambitious literacy initiative ever -- training teachers in building reading skills throughout the curriculum, with an emphasis on awareness of students' cultural backgrounds. McWashington also points to the development of small learning communities, or "schools within schools."

That approach may offer a key to softening the jarring contrasts at Garfield, says Paul Hill, director of the UW Center on Reinventing Public Education.

Garfield, arguably, already operates one such mini-school: the honors and AP program, Hill says.

If Garfield added others to attract students of various interests and abilities -- an arts academy, for example, or one linked to careers in aerospace -- it might make the academic all-star team less of a flashpoint, he says.

Hill is loath to suggest an end to Garfield's glamour program and its remarkable record of scholastic success.

"It's pretty terrible to break up something that works as well as that does," he says. "But you want to make it less of an affront to other people."

TWO STUDENTS, TWO PERSPECTIVES

Matt Weintraub

Meryl Schenker / P-I
Matt Weintraub
Matt Weintraub is an "APP kid," an alumnus of the Accelerated Progress Program for the smartest K-8 students in the Seattle School District.

That guaranteed him a seat in the freshman class at Garfield High School, where he has moved naturally through an extensive sequence of honors courses -- courses where, like him, most of the students are white.

On the other side of Garfield's academic divide, in the regular courses, minority students predominate.

"It's ridiculous that it even occurred in the first place," Weintraub said. "It needs to change."

In the meantime, he admits he'll continue to benefit.

"When you have students on the lower end of the learning spectrum -- like the ones who have like an eighth-grade, or even a fifth-grade, reading level in, let's say, your English class -- it's obviously going to take your teacher's time away from the students who are going to achieve higher. When you have an honors class, you're going at a faster pace.

"I have received a better education because of that, but I'm really dismayed that not everybody can have that."

Weintraub came to Garfield from Washington Middle School. He looked at other schools, both public and private, before deciding on Garfield, one of the most racially diverse schools in the city.

"It really allowed me to grow as a person. When you come from (APP at) Washington, it's like 95 percent white. You're sheltered."

The senior, who lives on Phinney Ridge with his mother, Jinny, a real estate agent, joined Garfield's swim team and Cultural Relations Club. Elected class treasurer, he's been picked to speak at this week's commencement.

Weintraub's grade-point average at Garfield is 3.2 -- a solid B. He didn't stick to the most demanding curriculum, the path that leads some to the Ivy League. He's thinking about going to the University of Idaho with an eye on becoming a national park ranger.

"I like nature and I like working with people and I like teaching people," he said.

For his final semester, Weintraub signed up for Advanced Placement classes in government and statistics, plus independent study in environmental science.

"I kind of made myself a promise to get a 4.0," he said, "just to see if I can."

Clayton Kadushin

Meryl Schenker / P-I
Clayton Kadushin
Clayton Kadushin is getting a jump on his higher education through the Running Start program, taking classes at Seattle Central Community College while still enrolled at Garfield High School.

He might have earned college credit another way: signing up for Advanced Placement courses, more abundant at Garfield than at any other public high school in the city.

But he passed up the opportunity.

"I didn't feel like doing any extra work that I didn't have to do, I guess," Kadushin said.

Instead, like most black students at Garfield, he stuck to the standard curriculum, earning a 2.6 grade-point average. The 18-year-old senior generally followed the advice of the school's counselors. Sometimes they would suggest he tackle one of the accelerated courses, he said, "but I didn't ever want to do that."

His mother, Damaris Pearson, said the transition to Garfield from a much-smaller middle school was rough on her son.

"When he started at Garfield in the ninth grade, he got overwhelmed," she said. "He lost his focus about academics and got more into hanging out."

And he didn't want to be labeled as a brainiac.

"You wouldn't be cool," she said. "He wanted to be like the 'normal' kids."

Kadushin chose Garfield because it was the high school closest to his home, then in the Central District. He now lives in Skyway with his little brother and mother, a career counselor at Franklin High. He takes two Metro buses each way between school and home.

Kadushin was a middle-distance runner on the track team at Garfield, but much of his attention outside the classroom has gone to the Sigma Beta Club, the high school-level affiliate of the black college fraternity Phi Beta Sigma. At Garfield, he was club president, volunteering at food banks and at nursing homes and performing dance routines.

After graduation, Kadushin plans to finish his associate's degree at Seattle Central, then transfer to a four-year school.

"I want to get my B.S. degree in business, maybe, or psychology," he said. "No specific plans. It keeps changing a lot, lately."